"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

New York Times Editorial Fails Another Fact Check on Charter Schools

The NYTimes Editorial Board is one of the most reliable voices for the corporate education losers who continue to double down on testing accountability policies and privatization schemes that now have decades of evidence to substantiate their failure. Today's entry is on charter schools, which has this nugget:

The editorial states: "A study published
earlier this year shows that the typical New York City charter student learned
more reading and math in a year than his or her public school peers."

This is simply a lie. Even if you give credence
to the CREDO study, which has been critiqued for sloppy documentation and
unexplained use of something called "days of learning," the results
shows no impact for New York City charters in Reading (0.00), while showing
significant charter impacts in Math (0.11) (see p. 53 of linked report).

Given the Wall Street resource advantage that
charters have and the fact that they accept fewer special education and ELL
students, one would expect big differences in both reading and math, especially
when the matched public schools are often the poorest in the district.

And what is totally masked by measuring
"charter impact" are the deepening knowledge proficiency gaps between
the poor and the middle class. The result: children are left further behind in
corporate charters that use total compliance and zero tolerance methods that no
middle class parent would ever allow.